Aleksi Kallio makallio at saunalahti.fi wrote on Mon, 19 Mar 2001 19:01:50 +0200
>What are you opinions on Merlin (ie. JDK 1.4) and its Java XML Data
>Binding? Will it kill JDOM? Will they coexist? Is it even reasonably to
>compare them?
I do not find them reasonable to compare. JDOM is a good tool to do such a
binding before 1.4, but all of my use of the tool is as a means of building
or parsing an XML document. Those documents that are a direct
representation of an object may well end up expressed in the new 1.4 tools,
but most documents I work with are not.
For example, Apple writes out OS X property lists in XML. If I wish to
read such a property list programatically in a Java program, the best way
to do it is likely to read it with JDOM.
A second example: I have a program that generates RuneQuest character
sheets. These are eventually printed from a web browser, and will be done
from pdfs as soon as I learn FOP. I use xalan to generate them from the
core XML format, thus I do not really want them expressed as collections of
objects suited for Java, but as pure structured data to be reformatted for
display in other packages. Thus, the new 1.4 tools will not help me, but
JDOM will.
One of my clients may well end up using it to generate/read a query to be
sent to a rather complicated database. We have not entirely decided yet.
Thus, JDOM and the new tools have very different missions. JDOM exists to
create and interpret disk and memory images of XML, while the new tools in
1.4 are focused on the very important object serialization problem which
has plagued Java from the start. (This limited subset of the overall data
binding problem I suspect they may well have solved, at least in the Swing
domain. The larger scale problem I am less certain of, and do not expect
miracles.)
Scott
Scott Ellsworth
scott at alodar.com